Wednesday, August 14

ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* A New Kind of Love (1963). Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Maurice Chevalier in a romantic comedy about a playboy correspondent and a standoffish career girl in Paris.

Friday, August 16

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO AMERICA? (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Young adults representing a cross section of opinion discuss the nation's unrest. Edwin Newman moderates. Last of a four-part series.

Saturday, August 17

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The 100-mile U.S. Auto Club Championship for big, Indianapolis-type racers. Live, from Springfield, Ill.

Sunday, August 18

CAMERA THREE (CBS, 11-11:30 a.m.). Gilbert Highet, critic, scholar and author, attempts to solve a minor but amusing artistic puzzle concerning the identity of the bridegroom in Peasant Wedding, a 16th century painting by Flemish Master Pieter Bruegel.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Atomic Medicine." What nuclear scientists at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratories are doing to harness the atom for medicine.

ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9 p.m. to midnight). Cecil B. DeMille's Academy Award-winning The Greatest Show on Earth (1953), with Charlton Heston, James Stewart, Betty Mutton, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour, and a three-ring supporting cast of circus performers.

Monday, August 19

N.F.L. PRE-SEASON GAME (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion). The Chicago Bears and World Champion Green Bay Packers limber up for the coming pro football season. From Milwaukee.

Tuesday, August 20

SINGER PRESENTS THE SOUNDS OF '68 (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Ed Ames hosts a pop-music special featuring nine finalists of a summer-long talent hunt. Soul Singer Aretha Franklin is guest star.

Check local listings for dates and times of these NET programs:

BLACK JOURNAL. Included in this month's "black magazine" are stories on the semantics of color, a profile of Negro Film Director Melvin Van Peebles, and a report on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which four years ago challenged the all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention and this year joins a Mississippi coalition of dissidents to renew its appeal.

NET JOURNAL. "Never a Backward Step." Documentary on Lord Thomson, whose press empire comprises 149 papers in Great Britain, Canada and the U.S. Thomson discusses the press with Media Medium Marshall McLuhan and conducts an interview with Stalinist Antonin Novotny while he was President of Czechoslovakia.

THEATER

Straw Hat

Laughter is welcome any time of year, especially as an antidote to summer doldrums. Some of the comedies scheduled for this week:

STOCKBRIDGE, MASS., Berkshire Theater Festival. Elaine May, Woody Allen and Terrence McNally each contribute one-acters to Next, featuring Gabriel Dell, James Coco and Arnold Stang.

OGUNQUIT, MAINE, Playhouse. Vivian Vance plays a do-gooder, named Mother of the Year, with five sons in P.W. camps, in Everybody's Girl, a new work by John Patrick (Teahouse of the August Moon). Complications spring from the fact that she's never been married.

WESTON, VT., Playhouse. Two men suffering hangovers from marriages on the rocks try setting up an all-male household in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple.

NASHVILLE, IND., Brown County Playhouse. Neil Simon again, churning up breezes of hilarity as a newly married couple learns how to walk Barefoot in the Park.

EXCELSIOR, MINN., The Old Log Theater. A psychiatrist writing about teen-agers despairs of ever coping with his own offspring during The Impossible Years.

DANVILLE, KY., Pioneer Playhouse. Stanley Markel's new play, Pregnant Thought, follows a married couple, both writers, through a series of mistaken matings.

CUSTER PARK, S. DAK., Black Hills Playhouse. Two old ladies from Brooklyn seduce men with wine and kill them with kindness in Arsenic and Old Lace.

RECORDS

Pop

PLAYBACK: THE APPLETREE THEATER (Verve-Forecast). Never let it be said that the Boylan brothers, John, 26, and Terence, 21, lack a sense of humor. This cycle of rock songs is an explosion of surprises, blending fey whimsy with just plain loony-bin clowning. A country corn put-on called I Been Spending Too Much Money at the Fair is a hilarious frontal attack on the Nashville sound.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Columbia). The name this group chose for themselves may sound a bit square and their topics--sex, drugs and what's wrong with the U.S. --are hardly novel. Yet the gut level lyrics and third stream rock accompaniment are inventive and challenging. The ring modulator and Durrott Synthesizer, electronic instruments, are used as if they were invented for this group.

LUMPY GRAVY: FRANK ZAPPA AND THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION (Verve). Long before the Beatles turned acid with Sgt. Pepper, the Mothers were setting a new rock trend with their first release, entitled Freak Out. This is Album No. 4, and their musical anarchy of electronic sound, dialogue, parody, rock improvisation and jazz has developed into a vastly complex style unparalleled on the rock scene. It's not for dancing. Just lend an ear.

STRANGE NIGHT VOYAGE: THE MERCHANTS OF DREAMS (A & M Records). Peter Pan, Captain Hook, the clock-gulping Croc; Dorothy from Oz and Alice from Wonderland are aboard for this Strange Night Voyage. "Grow young," plead The Merchants. "Stay young while you can." And off these dream vendors sail in a rocking-beat boat to celebrate the joys of childhood fantasies. A solid performance, full of vitality, taste and style, with meticulous, well-wrought orchestration.

AERIAL BALLET: NILSSON (RCA Victor). While most rock singers sound like so many caterwauling cats conjugating the verb "to be," Nilsson, 25, sings with clear honesty and lack of pretense. He has composed a highly creative rock-vaudeville show with all the acts: a tap number, a cowboy ballad, a torch song, and an acrobatic display of vocal jazz scatting. Altogether an excellent performance despite an overlying, oddly out-of-place air of melancholy that sometimes threatens to spoil the fun.

SONG CYCLE: VAN DYKE PARKS (Warner Bros.). Van Dyke Parks sings a surrealist's dream in a voice so innocent as to draw any listener into his experience. He has experimented with the usual recording technique by taping voice upon melody upon stereophonic sound effects, then mirroring it back at varying speeds until it becomes a collage of sound light-years away from a "live" performance. What does it matter if the lyrics are opaque at times? The effect is all shimmering beauty.

CINEMA

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. By reverse alchemy, Carson McCullers' novel is turned into dross, but two outstanding performances almost redeem the project: Alan Arkin as a poignant deaf-mute, and Cicely Tyson as the embodiment of the slogan "Black is Beautiful."

ISABEL. French Canadian Actress Genevieve Bujold and her writer-director husband Paul Almond click with their first professional collaboration, creating a shocker that manages to be simultaneously heartwarming and spine-chilling.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick dazzles the eye and bends the mind in this space-age parable of the secret of life.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. In this transposition of John Osborne's bitterly impassioned play, Nicol Williamson sears the screen as a London solicitor who awakes one morning to the frightening realization that he has grown middle-aged and that his life is meaningless.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. Revenge is sweet, bitter, salty and sour in Franc,ois Truffaut's poetic evocation of an idee fixe. Jeanne Moreau is the woman with the idee, and the men who killed her husband are the ones who get fixed in a series of alternately comic and eerie murders.

ROSEMARY'S BABY. In this chilling adaptation of Ira Levin's bestselling thriller of witchery at work in a Manhattan apartment building, Mia Farrow, as the beleaguered wife, gives a memorable portrayal of innocence and vulnerability.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE SPLENDID PAUPER, by Allen Andrews. The biography of Moreton Frewen, Winston Churchill's froward uncle and a born loser who went from one financial debacle to another with style, imagination and diligence.

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY, by Will and Ariel Durant. At a time when nostalgia and/or despair is intellectually fashionable, the Durants argue that the best is probably yet to come, in a witty and perceptive program note to their monumental 10-volume Story of Civilization.

HAROLD NICOLSON: THE LATER YEARS, 1945-1962, VOL. III OF DIARIES AND LETTERS, edited by Nigel Nicolson. This third and final installment of Author-Politician Nicolson's sprightly and candid reminiscences clinches his position as the brightest British diarist since Pepys.

THE FRENCH, by Franc,ois Nourissier; THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE, by J.J. Servan-Schreiber. France's cultural achievements and sophisticated tastes, say these two candid Frenchmen, mask crumbling institutions and outdated attitudes that must be changed if the country is to avert disaster.

THE BURNING GLASS, by S. N. Behrman. Set in Salzburg, New York and Hollywood during the '30s, the celebrated playwright's first novel tells of the shifting fortunes of a group of intellectuals and socialites who make very agreeable company.

HENRY VIII, by J. J. Scarisbrick. In this massive but rewarding study by a British historian, the shrewd, boisterous, contradictory monarch is portrayed in all his vainglorious heroics, but rarely as a hero.

THE SECOND REBELLION, by James McCague. A vivid account of how at least 1,200 people died and entire blocks of Manhattan were devastated during the 1863 antidraft riots by Irish immigrants who refused to fight in the Civil War.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, by John Atkins; THE HUXLEYS, by Ronald W. Clark. Human being or controlled experiment? Guru or walking encyclopedia? The often contradictory legends left by this brilliant member of a renowned intellectual family are examined by two biographers who almost find the missing link.

ENDERBY, by Anthony Burgess. In this retouching of an earlier portrait of the artist as a middle-aged gasbag, the gifted English novelist combines the elements of entertainment and enlightenment with uncommon artistry.

TRUE GRIT, by Charles Portis. An uproarious period piece about a 14-year-old girl who turns the wild frontier topsy-turvy while avenging the murder of her pa.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week)

2. Couples, Updike (2)

3. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (3)

4. True Grit, Portis (4)

5. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (5)

6. Topaz, Uris (6)

7. Heaven Help Us, Tarr (8)

8. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford

9. The Queen's Confession, Holt (7)

10. Vanished, Knebel (10)

NONFICTION

1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)

2. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (3)

3. Iberia, Michener (2)

4. The Naked Ape, Morris (4)

5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (6)

6. The Right People, Birmingham (7)

7. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (8)

8. Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, Collins and Lapierre (5)

9. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet, Stillman and Baker (9)

10. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (10)

*All times E.D.T.

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